Scotty's plan, however, does not go as expected. Though Kirk is rescued, the famed captain and the engineer, as well as Captain Picard, Guinan, and the crew of the Enterprise-D, are trapped in an altered past where there is no Federation, and no human race. Sarek of Vulcan leads a ragtag collection of species fighting a losing battle against the Borg, who have swarmed into the Alpha Quadrant and assimilatedEarth.

Starfleet's finest miracle worker must find a way to restore the timeline before the galaxy is overrun...

A year after Kirk's apparent death in the Nexus, retired Captain Montgomery Scott decides to join the Norpin V colony thanks to a brief encounter with Guinan. As seen in "Relics," that journey would see him trapped in a transporterpattern buffer for 75 years until the Enterprise-D rescues him. After being given the shuttlecraftGoddard, he roams space, haunted by dreams of Kirk and EnsignMatt Franklin, who died in the buffer.

About six months after being rescued, Scott responds to a distress call from two Narisian siblings, Garamet and Wahlkon onboard a century-old Starfleet shuttlecraft. Their race's technology has been accelerated by an unknown race called the Wise Ones. They lead Scott back to the equally-ancient KlingonBird-of-Prey in which the Narisian Proctors discovered the shuttlecraft. Scott repairs the ship and christens it Bounty 2, but decides not to tell Starfleet about his find.

Instead, he returns to the Enterprise-D to retrieve the logs of the original Bounty's trip to the 20th century, planning to reproduce the incident to save his captain. Guinan becomes concerned about his intentions, prompting the Enterprise to pursue his shuttle. Scott has enough of a head start to rendezvous with the Bounty 2, so the Enterprise follows him as closely as possible.

Arriving more or less when he means to, Scott beams Kirk from the Enterprise-B just before he would be pulled into the Nexus. At that instant, the Enterprise-B disappears, replaced by a pair of Borg cubes. Similarly, when the Enterprise-D arrives a few days later, its crew find themselves in a timeline overrun by Borg.

In the scene where Guinan and Scotty first meet in Glasgow, she toasts: "To the future... that is where we will all spend the rest of our lives." This roughly quotes The Amazing Criswell narrating the opening of the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.